Without going into vast detail, Pashtuns are an ancient tribe of people from Central Asia, known for their propensity for violence, love of sodomy, and interesting hats. The culture they have created for themselves is intensely hyper-masculine, which has only been magnified since the spread of Islam to the region in the 7th century. Pashtun males are expected “to protect Zan, Zar, Zmaka (females, gold and land),” while Pashtun females are used as little more than baby factories. Much of the country is still illiterate, and as such relies heavily on oral tradition. One might be happy to discover that it is easy to become a Pashtun, as knowing Pashto is the main determinant of who is a Pashtun and who isn’t.

Peter Hopkirk has discussed the tribes of Central Asia at length in his book “The Great Game“. Like every other Central Asian tribe, the Pashtuns are a treacherous lot that can’t be trusted with anything; they are liars and betrayers from birth. I once had a discussion with a Pakistani fellow at my undergraduate university on the people of Afghanistan and the tribal areas His thoughts on them?

“They have no culture, no religion, no knowledge or anything. All they know how to do is kill the enemy.”

While I think this fellow’s indictment is a little excessive (afterall, Pashtuns are almost universally Muslim), it is clear that Pashtun’s suffer from bad PR since this whole terror business started happening.

Did I say bad PR? Well, with what I am about to discuss next, we might have to upgrade that to awful PR.

The Sexual Deviants of Central Asia

I have already broached the subject of Central Asian homosexuality previously. Pashtun homosexuality is entirely uncontroversial in Afghanistan. Hell, there is a humorous Afghan saying that birds fly over Kandahar with only one wing – the other wing being used to cover their posteriors.

However, Pashtuns are not just homosexuals; they’re unabashed pedophiles as well. I find the topic of Pashtun pederasty to be utterly mystifying. Despite living in a society governed by one of the strictest forms of Islam, Pashtun men routinely have sex with each other and have sex with young boys – while still swearing up and down they are not homosexual. Forget about Orwell’s doublethink; I think the Pashtuns are up to triple or quadruplethink.

Homosexuality and pederasty are endemic to Central Asia at large. The sexual deviancy of the Central Asian tribes is old news to anyone who has remotely studied the region (this article runs back to 2002), but has now become all the rage since the recent firing of a Green Beret officer who beat up an Afghan police officer who was raping a young boy he kept chained to his bed (among other illicit activities observed). Peter Hopkirk’s “Great Game” discusses at least three example of such deviancy:

There is a brief mention of an emir who kept a harem of some forty “degraded beings” as his personal male harem.

A German doctor managed to infiltrate the ancient city of Bokhara, and returned with unprintable stories of sexual deviancy (“unnamed enormities”) taking place behind the city walls.

The wrinkly, old king of Sind had a thing for young boys dressed up like girls.

Pakistan, despite being ruled essentially as an Islamic theocracy, is packed to the brim with child rapists, as evidenced by this documentary here. Despite being a capital offense, homosexuality is more or less tolerated by the authorities, presumably because if the sodomy laws were strictly enforced there would be too many hangings.

“Boy Play”

Endemic to southern Afghanistan, the practice of “bacha bazi”, or “boy play”, has persisted in Afghanistan for centuries. The documentary here discusses the practice in detail. Briefly, the practice involves a pimp selecting a particularly handsome, young, beardless boy, and paying off the family in exchange for the child. The boy is then taught how to sing and dance, given girl’s clothes adorned with bells, and paraded before a (sometimes rather large) group of horny, middle-aged men. The boy sings and dances before the crowd, sexually enticing the men. After the dance is over, bids are taken on who will get to sleep with the boy for the night – and prices can sometimes reach into the tens of thousands of dollars.

One might think the Afghan police forces would put a stop to these enormities – but alas, they often join in on the fun for themselves. During Taliban rule, the practice was outlawed and enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – with the punishment being to have a brick wall toppled onto oneself.

The reasons for this intense focus on male-male sex stem from the severe sexual segregation of Afghan society. Unless they are married, men and boys attending a (sexually-segregated) madrassa can go for months at a time without seeing a woman. Furthermore, women are seen as generally unclean and inferior to men anyways. As the Afghan saying goes, “Women are for babies, boys are for pleasure.” Throughout these articles I have linked to, a common theme is that these males would prefer to have sex with women, but unfortunately sexual access to women is kept under such firm lock-and-key that they have to resort to homosexuality to get their sexual release.

Bacha bazi has become such an intense interest for Pashtun men, that many of them have lost all attraction to their own wives and women in general, and instead prefer young boys. One source accounts a humorous story of an Army medic team that had to explain to a puzzled husband how he could get his wife pregnant – he responded in revulsion. Amazingly, these man-boy relationships can often persist even into an actual marriage, with the boy being kept around the house with the wife powerless to stop it.

Reflection

As an aside, I admit I have experienced some very depressing, dark, bleak times in my life. But seeing the two documentaries I have linked to above have reminded me to count my blessings, and to acknowledge that I actually have it pretty good. I make a decent wage, have a respectable job, can vote, was never molested as a child, am able-bodied, have health insurance, running water, food in my refrigerator, and electricity in my apartment. Meanwhile, the poor street children of Pakistan are reduced to selling their rear ends to sodomites in exchange for cricket bats, and getting high off glue to stun themselves of the misery of their pointless, tortured lives.

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Tue, 08 Jul 2014 18:18:34 +0000gs32cahttps://sabirphotography.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/jami-mosque-in-bkhara-uzbegistan-ussr-aug-1981/https://sabirphotography.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/ceiling-of-a-mosque-in-bokhara-uzbegistan-ussr-1981/
Tue, 08 Jul 2014 17:50:42 +0000gs32cahttps://sabirphotography.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/ceiling-of-a-mosque-in-bokhara-uzbegistan-ussr-1981/https://sabirphotography.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/bokhara-uzbegistan-ussr-aug-1-1981-2/
Tue, 08 Jul 2014 17:14:28 +0000gs32cahttps://sabirphotography.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/bokhara-uzbegistan-ussr-aug-1-1981-2/ISMAIL SAMANI MAUSOLEUM (9-10th Century) was built by an architect to put its foundation on a floating base to protect it against earthquakes, it has survived to date
]]>https://sabirphotography.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/bokhara-uzbegistan-ussr-aug-1-1981/
Tue, 08 Jul 2014 17:02:54 +0000gs32cahttps://sabirphotography.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/bokhara-uzbegistan-ussr-aug-1-1981/GREAT MINARET – ONE OF THE OUTSTANDING ARCHITECTURAL GEMS IN USSR
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Sun, 15 Jun 2014 16:32:55 +0000adrianwalkersmithhttps://adrianwalkersmith.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/a-tale-of-three-cities/Casimira and I have visited three historic cities in Uzbekistan; Bokhara, Samarkand and Khiva. What is noticeable in all three cities is how much empty space surrounds the monuments. one wonders if this was always the case or was there wholesale demolition to put the buildings into a setting, Samarkand differs from the other cities in that the empty spaces are islands in a modern city but in Bokhara and Khiva it is almost like wondering round a film set. The buildings are real but in Bokhara in particular it looks as though everything that was not of the right period has been demolished and replaced with something more in keeping. Quite separately Casimira and I were reminded of the old town in Rhodes.
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Sun, 15 Jun 2014 16:10:47 +0000adrianwalkersmithhttps://adrianwalkersmith.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/the-minaret-of-death/

The minaret of the Friday Mosque in Bokhara. About 1000 years old. Once the tallest in the world and used to execute criminals by putting them in a sack and dropping them over the side

I had finished reading Travels into Bokhara: The Narrative of a Voyage on the IndusBeing an account of a Journey from India to Cabool, Tartary and Persia. (1834) by Sir Alexander Burnes not long before I reached the Amulet Hotel. It had originally been built as a madrasah for Islamic students to study philosophy and religion in the early 19th century by the famous merchant, Sayed Kamol. Now the student’s cells made quite adequate hotel rooms.

Amulet Hotel – Bokhara

I was there for the usual reasons, Arabian Nights tales of the fable covered bazaars filled with ikat silks and aromatic spices and the magical Bokhara carpets; that and to see the “Bug Pit” at The Ark Fortress, where Colonel Charles Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly had been imprisoned for so long before word of the disastrous British Retreat from Kabul in the 1st Afghan war reached Emir Nasrulla Khan. After that the British officers were no longed deemed necessary pawns in the Great Game – which, coincidentally, was a term coined by the unfortunate Captain Conolly several years before they beheaded him in the main square.

CARPETS

Bokhara is the generic name applied to carpets produced by several different Turkoman tribes, since that was the Silk Road city where they were sold. Probably the most common Turkoman tribe to be associated with the term Bokhara was the Tekke. The field had a very distinctive gul design.

Tekke-Turkoman Carpet

This was a very nice carpet, maybe late nineteenth century, very tight and the warp threads were white wool, unlike the modern carpets, which use gray wool. I already had a Tekke in my collection and this was was a bit big to carry overland to Afghanistan. I was sure I could find something equally nice in Kabul. As it turned out, this one was one of the better carpets I saw on the trip…but not the best. That’s the one that got away,

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Wed, 21 Aug 2013 08:29:47 +0000litgazhttps://litgaz.wordpress.com/2013/08/21/burnes-travels-into-bokhara/Another of Eland‘s nicely-produced re-issues of travel-writing from the past, but I’m not really sure how to take this one. It’s from the 1830s, and Alexander Burnes was basically a British spy at the beginning of what is, I feel, insultingly called ‘the Great Game’ – the rivalry between empires, especially the British and Russian, over the lands in the Middle East. He basically blagged his way up the Indus river, across what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan, pretending, lying and deceiving the local inhabitants, whilst secretly mapping and storing information which would later be invaluable in Britain’s empire-building and outwitting the Russians, and for which he was much praised by his colonialist superiors.

And yet, it’s a fascinating account of the places and the people from nearly two centuries ago, with lots of detail, and an extremely good (original) map to help you follow the journey. Burnes took considerable risks, and, because he was a spy in disguise, came into close contact with people and their customs and way of life, through his familiarity with their language.

What offends me really, I suppose, is the tone of superiority that sometimes comes through towards them, confident in the military power of the British. On the other hand, his explorations eventually led to the first British adventure in Afghanistan, which was a disaster, like all subsequent ones, including the present unfinished business there.

It is interesting how one book can stimulate your thinking. Over the weekend, I read a book by Fitzroy Maclean called A Person from England (published by Jonathan Cape for the Readers Union, London, 1959). The book’s title is a little misleading, because the book is all about peoples’ adventures in what we now call ‘Central Asia’, but which many of the adventurers discussed in the book knew as ‘Turkestan’.

Of particularly interest was the first chapter, from which the book takes its name. The ‘Person from England’ was the Reverend Joseph Wolff, a Bavarian Jew who converted to Christianity and became a vocal advocate for his newfound religion. In the early 1840s, Wolff went on a mission to Bokhara (also spelt Bukhara), to see if he could determine the fate of two British Army officers, Colonel Charles Stoddard and Captain Arthur Connolly. The Emir of Bokhara apparently had imprisoned, treated brutally, and possibly executed these two ‘Britishers’, possibly because he felt that, even though they claimed to be on a diplomatic mission, they actually were spies. This was a reasonable assumption given that the British and Russian empires had long been playing their shadowy ‘Great Game’ (Torniree Tenye, ‘Tournament of Shadows’, for the Russians) of strategic one-upsmanship on the edges of their respective expanding empires in India and Central Asia. In 1838, when Stoddard arrived in Bokhara, which some regarded as the holiest city in Turkestan, the emirate was located roughly in the middle of these two competitive empires. In 1868, the Russians subsumed it.

Going as a lone Englishman or feringi (foreigner) to Bokhara from London was a long, difficult and dangerous undertaking for Wolff, even though this widely travelled Anglican minister had visited Bokhara before in the 1830s. In his favour, Wolff was a resourceful, resilient, outgoing man who made friends easily. Importantly, many who met him, including Muslims, considered him to be a dervish or mystic—a man of God. Conversely, Wolff’s mission was dangerous because he was going to parts of Asia remote from British influence, with almost no possibility of British officials supporting him diplomatically or militarily. Closest was Persia, through which Wolff travelled to Bokhara. Additionally, the Emir of Bokhara, Nasrullah, who was all-powerful locally, was somewhat erratic and apparently had a sadistic streak that had worsened with age. According to Maclean, he was an ‘ugly customer’ who had murdered his father, elder brother and three younger brothers in 1826 in order to seize the Bokharan throne. While inexcusable, such regicide and fratricide were not unknown practices at this time throughout the world.

In the event, Wolff arrived too late. The long-suffering Stoddard, who may converted to Islam under duress, and Connolly had already been beheaded. Both apparently died proclaiming themselves to be Christians, which appealed to Wolff, but not to Muslim Bokharans.

I find this story interesting for a number of reasons. First, there is a man in our district who is a distant relative of Charles Stoddard. More then once, we have talked about the unfortunate demise of his forebear in Bokhara. Second, having studied Russian, I am interested in how the Russian Empire began, expanded, consolidated, then crumbled after the 1917 Revolution, including in Central Asia, but which the Communists in the mid-1920s essentially re-imposed, albeit under a different name.

Third, communications. Even though the two imprisoned British officers were closely surveilled, they managed to get limited communications to people far away from remote Bokhara. This was not unusual. Throughout Maclean’s book, there are many instances where feringis (usually British or Russian) used locals to successfully—on occasions—communicate with people far away from their immediate location. Indeed, the whole book is riddled with examples of intrigue, double-dealing and people’s loyalties appearing to be fluid. Even though the khanates of Central Asia—Bokhara, Khokand and Khiva, and their various vassals—were remote, no one in them, it seems, lived in a vacuum.

Fourth, the playing of the strategic Great Game. One reason why Nasrullah felt he could kill the Britishers was because things had gone very badly for the British Indian Empire in Afghanistan, to Bokhara’s south. In 1839, British-led forces from India had invaded Afghanistan in order to impose their own ruler on this recalcitrant state moving diplomatically towards Russia—or at least not kowtowing sufficiently to British strategic desires to limit (expanding) Russian influence in Central Asia. After some British ineptitude (to put it mildly), xenophobic Afghan warriors in early 1842 slaughtered some 16,000 British Indian soldiers and associated non-combatants trying to flee Afghanistan. In response, the British sent an ‘Army of Retribution’ to punish the Afghans and to free captured Britishers and Indians, after which they (the British) left Afghanistan to its own devices until 1878 (when basically the same British invasion, Afghan slaughter and British retribution occurred). By late 1842, the Emir of Bokhara, empowered after defeating Khokand to his east and by the chastened British fleeing Afghanistan, felt strong enough to execute the two British ‘spies’ with impunity. There was nothing that the British, who by now controlled almost all of India, could do, or chose to do.

Fifth, Central Asia connects to South Asia via Afghanistan, which nation also straddles the South-West Asia region via neighbouring Iran. Some analysts talk of a new ‘Great Game’ being played involving energy and pipelines, particularly from Turkmenistan and the Caspian Sea region southwards to India. The Central Asian region also has major water and border issues. It is an important region to watch—and understand, including in relation to its rich history—for the future.

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Product Description : wool rugs with exceptional quality will provide a lifetime of enjoyment you ll love the excellent value of a hand knotted wool rug skilled artisans meticulously hand craft each traditional rug design one knot at a time resulting in an ultra plush look and velvety feel that is enhanced by a palette of vibrant colors decorate your home with quality traditional rugs bokhara area rugs are invitingly comfortable while providing years of enjoyment and durability due to their remarkable density an Read More Details At Amazon.com

Disclaimer : 1. This page is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com2. Amazon, the Amazon logo, Endless, and the Endless logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.3. CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME.4. Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon.com at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.

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Sun, 01 Apr 2012 16:14:28 +0000Kay L.https://singlepeoplesgrocerylists.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/lets-write-off-march-2012/I’ve missed a month and a half of posting on here. Let’s just say March was a bad one in the Hall of Fame of bad ones. Although this blog’s topics relate to single people’s grocery shopping habits, food, wine and the newly-single “adventure,” I’m going to head OT on this one.

In the earlier part of March, one of my best friends was diagnosed with a life-threatening disease. This is a friend (her hubs, too) of close to 30 years. I still can’t get my head around this new information, but I’m refusing to allow any negative thoughts to come into my brain about outcomes. She’s the best and she’ll be okay. That’s what I’m going with.

My other best friend and soul mate, Bokhara, who I’ve talked about often on here, had a routine exam earlier in the month which led to some testing with a somewhat favorable outcome. But on March 19th after a run of very good days, he had to be put to sleep. He was tired and it was time. I’m so grateful I had him in my life for 16 1/2 years. He was a gift.

Needless to say, a trip down the cat food aisle at the grocery store made my heart gasp. And because Brie and wild salmon were his faves, it’ll be a while before I can eat those again.

So readers, please hold good thoughts and prayers for my two friends that they have peace, light and comfort on their roads ahead.